Associate Director, Software Engineering Specialist

Some careers shine brighter than others. If you're looking for a career that will help you stand out, join HSBC and fulfil your potential. Whether you want a career that could take you to the top, or simply take you in an exciting new direction, HSBC offers opportunities, support and rewards that will take you further. HSBC is one of the largest banking and financial services organisations in the world, with operations in 64 countries and territories. We aim to be where the growth is, enabling businesses to thrive and economies to prosper, and, ultimately, helping people to fulfil their hopes and realise their ambitions. We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our team in the role of Associate Director. In this role, you will: Runtime & Concurrency: Build high-concurrency async services (Python asyncio/Go) and scalable sync/async execution pipelines for AI/LLM guardrails, with backpressure, retries, timeouts, cancellation, overload protection, and rate limiting, optimised for production throughput/latency/resource use and resilient distributed execution. Streaming & Event-driven Architecture: Deliver low-latency streaming and real-time AI safety/monitoring pipelines using WebSocket/SSE/gRPC streaming and event-driven patterns, backed by Kafka/PubSub-style messaging, supporting chunked and streaming inference/detection workflows. Observability & Telemetry: Define and implement end-to-end metrics/tracing/telemetry standards for distributed AI runtimes (latency, queue health, streaming execution, detector runtime, overload handling), integrate OpenTelemetry/OpenInference, and improve dashboards, alerts, and production debugging. Reliability & Performance Engineering: Diagnose and fix bottlenecks, latency spikes, overload and scaling issues through profiling and concurrency tuning, and drive SLO/SLA-led practices to continuously improve fault tolerance and runtime resilience. AI Runtime Integration: Integrate AI/LLM serving into the platform runtime with inference orchestration and request routing, enabling async execution and batching where appropriate, and partner with AI engineers on production deployment and optimization. Guardrail Control & Governance Enablement: Build configuration-driven policy/detector controls with versioning, rollout/rollback, multi-tenant isolation, quotas/limits and scoped configs, plus auditability via config history and operational events, and feed runtime signals into evaluation and human-in-the-loop governance workflows. Engineering Excellence: Promote clean, scalable runtime architecture, contribute to reviews and operational troubleshooting, mentor engineers in async/distributed systems, and help set engineering standards and operational best practices. To be successful in this role, you should meet the following requirements: Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years building and operating distributed, cloud-native backend systems in production. Strong hands-on experience with Python (asyncio/FastAPI) and/or Go; deep understanding of non-blocking I/O and asynchronous programming. Proven experience designing high-concurrency services, including queueing, rate limiting, latency tuning, etc. Experience with event-driven architectures and streaming systems (WebSocket/SSE/message streaming). Solid understanding of observability (metrics/logs/traces) and distributed tracing concepts; hands-on instrumentation experience (e.g., OpenTelemetry). Experience building and operating REST/gRPC/WebSocket APIs and/or API gateway/platform components. Strong production troubleshooting skills: profiling, bottleneck analysis, incident triage, and root-cause analysis. Experience with Kubernetes/Docker and at least one public cloud platform (AWS/GCP/Azure).Working knowledge of platform operational controls such as RBAC/authentication/authorisation, configuration management, and audit logging. Demonstrates an AI-native mindset, applying AI-driven approaches to improve productivity, quality, and decision-making. Experienced in leveraging coding assistants (e.g., AI pair-programming tools) to accelerate software development, enhance code quality, and support engineering best practices. You'll achieve more when you join HSBC www.hsbc.com/careers HSBC is committed to building a culture where all employees are valued, respected and opinions count. We take pride in providing a workplace that fosters continuous professional development, flexible working and opportunities to grow within an inclusive and diverse environment. Personal data held by the Bank relating to employment applications will be used in accordance with our Privacy Statement, which is available on our website. Issued by - HSDI